TOP SHELF designer
Cheryl’s professional passions include natural user interfaces, design for scale and complexity, system design, and storytelling for product design.
She’s best known for her work on popular products including Amazon’s Alexa, the Echo Look, Cortana, Disney’s PhotoPass, the Sims series of games, and Microsoft’s Azure platform. Currently, Cheryl is the Director of User Experience for the Player Platform and head of the UX craft at Riot Games.
Ms. Platz holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and is a certified LUMA Institute Practitioner.
Cheryl also runs a design TikTok at @theCherylPlatz for a following of 36,000 viewers.
WORLD renowned speaker
Cheryl is founder and owner of Ideaplatz, LLC, a design education company through which she offers her interaction design talks and workshops at major conferences and companies around the world. Her experience in the performing arts makes Ms. Platz a uniquely engaging speaker.
Highlights include Interaction Latin America 2019, Interaction 17, 18, 19, 20, and 22, Amuse UX 2018, Webdagene 17, UX Week 2018, DesignOps Summit 2018, UX Days Tokyo & Seoul 2019, UX Scotland 2019, UX London 2018, and UxLx (Lisbon) 2017.
versatile actor and creator
A veteran film, video, stage, and voice-over actress, Cheryl is best known for co-starring in multiple Twitch television shows representing hundreds of hours of live broadcast shows on HyperRPG, GeekSpaceTV and her own Twitch channel.
Cheryl performed live improv professionally in Seattle as a 13-year member of the Unexpected Productions ensemble, and was also well-known in the area her many appearances on stages and at conventions with Seattle Experimental Theater and NERDprov.
You can catch Cheryl’s variety Twitch streams most Sundays from 10 AM – 1 PM Pacific at her Twitch channel FunnyGodmother.
About cheryl
Cheryl Platz is an internationally renowned design leader, author, speaker, and actor based in the Los Angeles area. Her first book Design Beyond Devices is available via Rosenfeld Media and most online booksellers in print and digital formats. She is currently the Director of User Experience, Player Platform at Riot Games, and owner of design education company Ideaplatz, LLC.
Cheryl’s acting and hosting work has been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world, from multi-cam livestream TV shows on Twitch and dozens of comic convention and arts festival appearances to her design TikTok account of 36,000 followers.
An East Coast native, Cheryl spent the first half of her life in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia suburbs and Carnegie Mellon University) and passed through stints in Orlando and San Francisco before making her home in Seattle for 17 years. Her professional career began with video gaming (Maxis/EA, Griptonite Games) and theme park technology (Walt Disney World), but she also spent years working on cloud and enterprise software (Microsoft) and technology for large scale philanthropy (Gates Foundation) as well as groundbreaking consumer products like Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana.
Cheryl has a long history of engagement with community organizations, including 2 years on the executive board of STEM nonprofit IGNITE Worldwide (Inspiring Girls Now for Technology Evolution); an ongoing role as an administrator with the community advocacy group The Online Creators Association, extensive volunteer work for Unexpected Productions and other arts organizations, and numerous guest appearances as a workshop instructor (DigiGirlz, Girls Who Code) and speaker.
In 2021, Cheryl launched a new chapter of her life with her husband and actor David Foubert by moving to Los Angeles for her new role at Riot Games.
Design beyond devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-device experiencess
by cheryl Platz – published by rosenfeld media
Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren’t you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer’s humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you’ll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.
Learn more at: RosenfeldMedia.com – Amazon.com – Goodreads
For sample chapters, downloads, podcasts, and more, visit the book resources page at Ideaplatz.com.